1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an image editing apparatus for retrieving and processing plural image parts and synthesizing them to a synthesized image, especially to the one to transfer the contents of natural language imput to a synthesized image.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In recent years, with the spread of word processor, it became possible for anybody to make a document so pretty as typeprinting. And, keeping step with this, there is eager demand for a function as to make easily illustration or synthesized image and take it into a document prepared by the word processor.
While, it has been put to practical use to arrange plural image parts on a background image and to edit to one synthesized image.
As a rudimentary method, in the past, functions to draw elementary figures such as a straight line, curve or circle and functions capable of applying simple process thereto were prepared, and these functions were properly combind to make various illustrations or figures. Further, it has been also practiced to store as parts the illustrations, figures or images made by the above described functions, to utilize again to improve the operation efficieny.
For the forming of more complicated synthesized image, it has been necessary, as a rule to store parts of images, to take out them by retrieving, and to combine and edit them retouching the parts or synthesizede images, if necessary.
Referring to the storing and retrieving of image parts, which comprises preparing plural image parts and background images and retrieving them one by one in accordance with the necessity for editing, various methods have been used; a method to use key words, and a method to store the images arranging them to upper and lower class relation, and to trace the relation looking at retrieved images from the top of the class relation to narrow down to the intended image.
As for editing, a procedure to enlarge or to reduce, for example, these background images and image parts, and a procedure to synthesize the parts on the background images were made independently by human agency, requiring complicated operation of input apparatus of a key board or mouse.
As an antecedent of an image editing apparatus using such method, Inoue, Shibata, and Nakasu, Filing system of image parts for image synthesis. The Trans. of the Inst. of Electronics, Informations and Communication Engineers (of Japan) Vol.J72-D II, No.11, PP.1824-1832 (1989-11), for example, can be mentioned.
However, with these method, to retrieve an intended image was not easy, since, by the keyword method matching of keyword needs very long time as the storing of image parts becomes large, and, by the method to arrange images according to their upper and lower relation the performace of the image data base depends much upon the person who prepares it.
With respect to editing, the retrieving, processing and synthesizing of the background images and image parts have to be made independently and inefficiently by hand work, and they required complex operation of various input apparatus as a keyboard or mouse, resulting in quite troublesome work, so that to make an expert of the operation long time of training were necessary.